On Aug. 21, the American Supreme Leader created yet another dubious government agency. The “National Design Studio” is named with this administration’s mastery of doublespeak.

One imagines this studio as a facility modeled after the one in Noah Hawley’s TV series Legion, where AutoCAD and Photoshop are repurposed for mind-control experiments and all of the meanings implied by “branding.” Because only billionaires matter in the 21st century, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) was appointed to head the agency as the “Chief Design Officer.” Photos of his smug, benign smile are just as terrifying as RFK Jr.’s official snarl.

By accepting the position, Gebbia’s complicity is a given—whatever damage this Design Studio manages to unleash. But, should we ever return to a less punitive era, will he be considered as culpable as the man, and the Legion of Super-Villains, who appointed him?

In Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl, the director and the audience have the answer to that question from the start. With vast archival resources at his disposal, Veiel has constructed an eviscerating cinematic response to Leni Riefenstahl’s life and career as well as Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

There is no background narrator summing up Riefenstahl’s collaboration with Adolf Hitler and the broader Nazi party on Triumph of the Will and Olympia, the films that established her reputation as the preeminent documentarian of the era. Veiel, instead, ingeniously repurposes Riefenstahl’s own work, and her own voice, to present a litany of damning evidence.

Filmed ten years before Riefenstahl’s death at the age of 101, Veiel inserts an interview that was cut from Müller’s doc. In it, Riefenstahl exhibits the kind of rage that matches Hitler’s oratorical flourishes as she reaches a fever pitch of unflinching ferocity.

Müller had the audacity to ask what interlocutors had been asking of her for decades. He was looking for a glimmer of contrition since an apology, from Riefenstahl’s point of view, was hors de combat. Veiel skillfully arranges video excerpts from British, German and American television talk shows. Whether in black and white or in bleached-out 1970s sepia tones, Riefenstahl returns again and again with the same set of scripted denials, the same unconvincing mask that reveals rather than hides her spiritual decay. With each passing decade, she remains the injured party, wrongly held to account for gas chambers she didn’t build and guns she never fired.

But the former actress kept returning to the stage. Although Riefenstahl appeared to enjoy tangling with the attention from interviews, both the negative and the positive responses from viewers, Veiel also unearths audio recordings of her conversations with Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production. After his release from prison in 1966, they engaged in a correspondence. As baleful players on a post-Nazi world stage, they advised each other on how to profit from their besmirched reputations. To feed a news-hungry public, the media paid both shadowy figures handsomely. The steely-eyed Riefenstahl gleefully took the money, retreated to a lovely forest chalet, and answered her detractors with an insolent, downturned rictus.

Riefenstahl cleanly avoids a sexist approach while recounting her life. The documentary does include Riefenstahl’s accounts of a paternal beating and at least two mentions of rape. But anecdotes about her formative years are included to fill in her portrait, not to arouse sympathy from the viewer. For Veiel, she is first and foremost a Nazi propagandist, spiritually and psychically paired with her racist cohorts for eternity.

In 1993, Müller was revisiting Riefenstahl during the production of her final film, Underwater Impressions (2002). Her stance of “plausible deniability” infuses his three-hour film with noxious fumes, but Müller expects his audience to come to its own conclusions. When Veiel marries an audio account of German soldiers murdering prisoners with a close-up of Riefenstahl as an eyewitness, it conveys the truest emotion that ever registers across her celluloid face.

Riefenstahl runs Sept 19-25 at 3Below Theaters, 288 S 2nd St, San Jose. 408.404.7711. 3belowtheaters.com

Ron Howard’s 53rd directorial effort, Eden, is based on the true story of a group of European idealists who moved to a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific, circa 1929, in order to 1) escape encroaching fascism and 2) start a brand-new civilization dedicated to “saving humanity from itself.”

Things did not exactly go swimmingly for the experiment, as a 2013 documentary on the same subject, titled The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, points out. The doc—directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine—combines the real-life writings of settler Dr. Friedrich Ritter and the home movies he shot with his partner, Dore Strauch. Ritter and Strauch’s number-one goal, as a pair of German intellectuals in the 1930s, was to get away from Adolf Hitler.

“Getting away from Hitler” may have a familiar ring to it for 2025 stateside audiences. The Ritters devote their time to quasi-political philosophical posturing, broken up by therapeutic sex. The new immigrants who follow them to Floreana Island have different agendas. Cue discontented campers among the iguanas and wild boars.

Filmmaker Howard, never one to shy away from vigorous action in exotic settings (Thirteen Lives, Rush), takes an already pulpy story and makes it even gaudier (Howard wrote the screenplay with Noah Pink), starring Jude Law as Dr. Ritter and Vanessa Kirby as the equally free-thinking Strauch. Ritter is a pompous academic who references Nietzsche and belittles his partner’s “arts and crafts” efforts to set up housekeeping in the inhospitable landscape.

Poised against them are some other newcomers, a family of earnest, truth-seeking Germans attracted to the island by newspaper reports: Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), his plucky wife Margret (American actor Sydney Sweeney) and their son. Margret is a dutiful hausfrau whose still waters run very deep; hard-working Heinz is as flamboyant as a plate of mashed potatoes.

The chief nemesis of all of the above is the self-styled “Baroness Eloise” (Ana de Armas), a classic femme fatale with a scandalous pedigree—picture a combination of Imelda Marcos and Cruella De Vil—fond of proclaiming to her mirror image: “I am the embodiment of perfection.” Soon after arriving on the beach to Wagnerian fanfare, the Baroness declares her intention to build a luxurious tourist resort on Floreana, from scratch. Thirty minutes in, Eden looks like a case of aging hippie farmers against delusional Coachella-style revelers. Everyone has a rifle. The scene is set for mayhem. 

Howard’s filmography is crowded with grandiose yet emotionally uncomplicated stories—tales of astronauts, firefighters, hard-luck prizefighters, 19th-century whalers, disgraced U.S. presidents, rebellious mathematicians, rough-edged men and women of the Old West, and a generous helping of Tom Hanks vehicles. The sort of movies AMPAS enjoys giving Oscars to.

As a director of agreeable middle-of-the-road entertainment, he’s come a long way since Grand Theft Auto (1977). And yet Howard’s characters can still slug it out like Roger Corman when the job is dirty and violent enough. Eden shows us the Ron Howard who’s not afraid to get down to the basic “animal instincts” that Professor Ritter and his fellow settlers display in the payoff scenes.

The ham-and-cheese-sandwich prize goes to Ana de Armas for her no-turning-back performance as the Baroness, would-be empress of the Galapagos. When she isn’t sneering down her nose at the dumfounded other colonists, the former “Bond Girl” specializes in uproarious hoochie-coochie with her harem of hired studs, alternating with ordinary gluttony and careless gunplay.

Compared to the Baroness’ silly sexpot shenanigans, Kirby’s Dore and Sweeney’s Margret resemble Dust Bowl refugees, sweaty and exhausted by endless toil in the service of a socially constructed dream of enlightened utopia, however unattainable.

Sweeney in particular deserves a spotlight. Her Margret Wittmer is the Mother Courage of the piece, diligent and unwavering, even under duress. Eden makes a strong argument for the female determinant in such rousing accounts of nonconformity. Hooray for blood-and-guts Darwinism! 

Playing at multiple theaters in Silicon Valley.

Oh, Hi! introduces itself with a brief preamble that suggests it’s going to be a horror pic, then resets the action to “36 Hours Earlier.” We’re immediately whisked to a car containing Iris (Molly Gordon) and her boyfriend Isaac (Logan Lerman) merrily singing along with a pop tune, on their way to a vacation rental—their very first such as a couple—in a country farm house.

As far as that goes, this might as well really turn out to be a youth-market horror film. All of them start that same way, with foolishly joyous characters blissfully unaware that they’re going to be slaughtered by the usual malevolent weirdo so many filmmakers can hardly resist using. In the case of Oh, Hi! the filmmaker is Sophie Brooks, a native of London, England, now based in Brooklyn, NY.

Brooks’ previous movie, The Boy Downstairs (2017), was an urban romantic sitcom built along standard “oopsy-daisy” lines—so we get the idea that the horror reference in the new film’s intro might just be more of a narrative “misdirection play.” Faking one way but going another. Iris and Isaac’s silly business with the roadside strawberry stand certainly promises light-hearted goofball flirtatiousness rather than full-on shocker, in a harmless wrapper.

The lovers find a collection of leather BDSM gear in a closet at the farm house and begin to experiment. Iris gets Isaac securely handcuffed to the bedposts, and suddenly a cloud passes over the would-be romantic interlude. The movie’s mood darkens.

As brought out in her dialogue, Iris has a few built-in personality tics: she can’t drink whiskey, doesn’t like to read books, has an inordinate fondness for Casablanca, etc. Personal taste issues that might seem unremarkable in a more relaxed setting all of a sudden take on sinister real-world meaning when one party is being held captive by another in an isolated house.

With Isaac unable to move, the two vacationers’ ongoing conversation turns to things like relationship defining, arguing for its own sake, an anxious phone call to Iris’ mother and a “how-to-relate” lesson. Iris is in charge, lawyering the situation. She’s in complete control. Days go by with Isaac still tied up.

There’s an unmistakable whiff of Stephen King’s Misery to this story, of course. Isaac makes the mistake of refusing to take Iris’ emotional complaints seriously, and pays a price. But when he raises the issue of false imprisonment the trap just gets tighter. The intervention of Iris’ friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Max’s friend Kenny (John Reynolds) only leads to more anxious mumblecore. The tiresome, self-involved therapy-happy dialogue session among all four characters becomes its own horror flick. At least until the threat of physical danger improbably dissolves, in the last reel.

But by then, do we care enough about Iris and Isaac to stick around and see what happens? Are any of these characters capable of unfastening themselves from themselves? Gordon, an experienced stage actor unafraid to help take a typical high school coming-of-age story like Olivia Wilde’s 2019 Booksmart to deadpan modern heights through the power of pure magnetism, handles the curious role of Iris almost as if it were an absurdist ritual.

By contrast, all Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) has to do to establish Isaac is to play the role straight. Isaac is the saddest, most helpless kind of sex object for Iris. She uses him, in the screenplay written by director Brooks with Gordon, as an example of everyday mediocrity. Their individual limitations instantly label these two American consumers as emblematic.

Eric Rohmer would politely excuse himself from associating with any of these babies—they need to grow up. Noah Baumbach would probably fall asleep in the first 30 minutes. Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t leave a single character standing. Greta Gerwig would tear up the scenario—no use sending it back for a rewrite. Don’t take a first date to this one. Keep your distance.

Opens July 24 at the Cinemark Century Redwood Downtown 20 in Redwood City.

Free summer entertainment continues around Silicon Valley, with cities stepping up to host concerts and festivals. Redwood City is particularly active, filling Courtyard Square with live music, movies and—starting this week—a series called Kids Rock. Andy Z and the Andyland Band performs at the first event in a three-date series (June 28, July 19 and Aug. 9).

Sponsored by Redwood City’s Public Library and Parks, Recreation and Community Services Department, Kids Day offers distractions for both children and adults. It starts at 10am and runs a couple hours at Courthouse Square, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City.

Also worthy of note: Bay Area Burger Week continues through June 29, so there’s still time to download the app at wklys.co/burgers and check out the many restaurants in Silicon Valley—plus others from the North Bay down to Santa Cruz—that have menu specials and price discounts. Use the app to check in, rate meals, post photos and win prizes.

Thu, June 26

Curator Talk—Maggie Dethloff, one of the curators of the exhibit Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene, will give a free talk. June 26, noon. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford. museum.stanford.edu/programs

Pobladores Night Market—Through July 31, this open-air market brings together local makers, artists, performers and food purveyors every Thursday. Free. June 26, 5:30-9pm. Parque de los Pobladores, 501 S 1st St, San Jose. sjdowntown.com

Summer Concert Series—Coast Tribe plays. Free. June 26, 6:30pm. Grant Park Soccer Field, 1575 Holt Ave, Los Altos. losaltosca.gov

Art Spielgelman: Disaster Is My Muse—Learn about the life and legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus in this documentary screening at 3Below Theaters, part of a series titled Never Again Is Now: Holocaust Cinema & the Fight Against Hate. $16. June 26, 7pm. 3Below Theaters and Lounge, 288 S 2nd St, San Jose. 3belowtheaters.com

LOVE—The Silicon Valley Gay Men’s Chorus concludes its 42nd season with a concert celebrating intimacy, heartbreak, passion and connection, all told through a queer lens. $25-$45. June 26, 7:30pm. Hammer Theatre Center, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. svgmc.org

Fri, June 27

Foodieland—For folks who can’t get enough of the food booths at the county fair, this three-day event is a scoop of heaven—with whipped cream on top. Food booths galore, plus shopping, games and live entertainment. Tickets are $7.91 in advance via Eventbrite; kids under 5 are free. June 27, 3-10pm; June 28-29, 1-10pm. Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, 344 Tully Rd. San Jose. foodielandnm.com

Mercy & The Heartbeats—This dance band featuring veteran Bay Area musicians deliver ’70s and ’80s crowd-pleasers, ’90s singalongs and current radio hits at the Morgan Hill Friday Night Music Series. Free. 5:30pm. Downtown Amphitheater, Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center, 17000 Monterey Road, Morgan Hill. morganhillchamber.org

Music on the Square—Redwood City’s free Friday concert series gets “Cold as Ice” with Foreigner Unauthorized, paying tribute to the British-American band for old fans and a new generation. Free. June 27, 6-8pm. Courtyard Square, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City. redwoodcity.org

Summer Concert Series in the Beer Garden—M’ssippi Slide plays jazz and R&B. Free. June 27, 6:30-10:30pm. Teske’s Germania, 255 N 1st St, San Jose. 408.292.0291. teskes-germania.com

PAC*SJ’s 35th Anniversary Celebration—The refurbished Hotel de Anza is the backdrop for the Preservation Action Council of San Jose to celebrate 35 years of saving San Jose’s historical landmarks. Guests will enjoy live music, signature cocktails, small plates, a raffle, a live auction and other activities. $135-$150. June 27, 6:30-10pm. Hotel de Anza, 233 W Santa Clara St, San Jose. preservation.org

National Theatre Live—The filmed production Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, starring Andrew Scott. $16-$23. June 27, 7pm. Hammer Theatre Center, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. hammertheatre.com

Bassem Youssef—The political satirist known as the Jon Stewart of the Arab world presents Works on a New Show. $43.19-$144.19. June 27, 7:30 & 9:45pm; June 28, 7 & 9:30pm. San Jose Improv, 62 S 2nd St, San Jose. improv.com/sanjose

Gimme Gimme Disco—Dancers will get their ABBA on for the sixth anniversary of this club night. $17-$23. June 27, 8pm. The Ritz, 400 S 1st St, San Jose. theritzsanjose.com

Sat, June 28

Capitol Dance Company—The dance school presents a day of entertainment featuring Peter Pan (10am and 2:30pm) and Imagine a Tale (7pm). $27-$42. June 28, 10:30am-9pm. Heritage Theatre, 1 W Campbell Ave, Campbell. downtowncampbell.com

The Drowsy Chaperone—West Valley Light Opera mounts a production of this peppy musical that pays tribute to the Jazz Age shows of the 1920s. $31-$58. Opens June 28; continues through July 26. Saratoga Civic Theater, 13777 Fruitvale Ave, Saratoga. 408.268.3777. wvlo.org

Stars and Strides 5K-10K Run/Walk—Participants meet in downtown San Jose at Discovery Meadow for this benefit for Valley Health Foundation. Donations will help the foundation offer programs and services that positively impact the health of everyone in the community. $17.23-$107.75. June 28, 7:30am. Discovery Meadow, 180 Woz Way, San Jose. starsandstridesrun.com

Sounds of the Shores—The Cocktail Monkeys deliver a mix of rock, R&B and soul. Free. June 28, 5pm. Marlin Park, 500 Cringle Drive, Redwood City. redwoodcity.org

Sun, June 29

Starlight Sundays—The San Jose Downtown Association kicks off its outdoor movie series, presented by UA Local Union 393, devoted to movies starring actor Jack Black. For the first night, the movie School of Rock is paired with live music by the School of Rock House Band. Food trucks and a beer garden to satisfy appetites. Movies start at dusk. Free. June 29, 5:30pm. St. James Park, 2nd St & E St James St, San Jose. sjdowntown.com/starlight-cinema

Tartuffe—Pocket Opera presents Kirke Mechem’s melodious masterpiece. $37-$92. June 29, 2:30pm. Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St, Mountain View. mvcpa.com

Lee Brice—Nashville singer-songwriter Lee Brice headlines with an opening set by Sofia Claire, a California country singer who grew up in Redwood City. $91-$1168. June 29, 7:30pm. Mountain Winery, Saratoga. mountainwinery.com

Mon, June 30

Red Rock Open Mic—Join this established open mic community and try out a new song or poem in front of a very supportive audience. Free. June 30, 6-9pm. Red Rock Coffee, 201 Castro St, Mountain View. redrockcoffee.com

Wed, July 2

Comedians and Empanadas—Bay Area stand-ups crack wise while the kitchen cranks out fresh empanadas every first Wednesday of the month. Free. July 2, 6-8pm. Casa Guzmania, 350 S Market St, San Jose. sjdowntown.com

Continuing

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean—This musical based on Ed Graczyk’s play features lyrics by actress and trans activist Shakina, who will also appear in the TheatreWorks production. $34-$54. Thru July 13. Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St, Mountain View. theatreworks.org

Dragons Love Tacos—An outdoor production of a play written by Ernie Nolan and based on the book by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri. Thru July 6. Palo Alto Children’s Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Rd, Palo Alto. paloalto.gov

Sweat—Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning SWEAT tells the story of coworkers who build friendships on the factory floor in industrial Pennsylvania, but layoffs and hard times find them pitted against each other. Directed by ShawnJ West and featuring a cast of 9 Bay Area actors. $20-$63. Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Thru June 29. or by phone at 650.329.0891. paplayers.org 

Sweet Charity—Memorable songs like “Big Spender” and “If My Friends Could See Me Now” have kept Sweet Charity popular since its debut in 1966. San Jose Stage’s production runs through June 29. $17-$74. Shows Wed.-Thu 7:30pm; Fri-Sat 8pm; Sun 2pm. The Stage, 490 S 1st St, San Jose. 408.283.7142. thestage.org

They say that heaven is like TV / A perfect little world that doesn’t really need you.

—from Laurie Anderson’s song “Strange Angels”

Wes Anderson’s visual fetishes are carefully curated and pristinely displayed in every perfectly composed frame of The Phoenician Scheme. The catalogue of beautiful goods for viewers to covet is inexhaustible. There are telephones on private airplanes with enormous black plugs; mid-century department store apparel boxes repurposed to stow away paperwork; a crossbow; watches; eyeglasses; record players; hardcover books; hats, bow ties and ashtrays. Watching the film is like visiting a museum exhibit in which a lost world is preserved behind walls of glass.

The exquisite set designs are transportive. They conjure a “it was better before” world in which technology was solely inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. This retro-futurism is fun to look at but the people posed inside these dioramas are as lifeless as dolls. Anderson places them inside of a weightless plot whose elements have been pilfered from early 20th century young adult adventure novels. Even an actor as shrewd as Benicio del Toro looks stranded inside of his middle-aged suits. They thicken his torso and slow him down.

Del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a wealthy con man who’s mastered the art of the deal. After he survives a plane crash with a vestigial organ in hand, he recalls a vision of God (a heavily bearded Bill Murray) with a host of Heavenly angels. Forced to confront his own mortality, he draws up a will. Korda passes over his 11 sons’ inheritance in favor of daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Although the question of his filial paternity is brought up intermittently throughout the narrative and ultimately left in doubt.

Covered by a white novitiate’s habit, the principled Liesl arrives at Korda’s palazzo armed with a strict sense of faith and propriety. She and Korda, her father/not-father, both agree to a trial period to determine if, as companions and cohorts, they’re a match. As they embark upon a road trip to sell potential investors on Korda’s Phoenician Scheme—the details of which become irrelevant as soon as they’re explained—their respective traits slowly bleed into each other’s way of being.

Liesl insistently insinuates her conscience into Korda’s amoral sphere of business dealings. Whereas Korda’s loucher life materializes, bit by bit, onto Liesl’s person in the form of cricket-green leggings, a jewel-encrusted string of rosary beads, eye shadow, lipstick and her first pint of beer. Makeup is all that Anderson adds to the 24-year-old Threapleton’s appearance to sexualize her. The relationship between her and del Toro, who is 34 years her senior, remains platonic but the film essentially documents their connection, a de facto love story. Michael Cera’s presence as Bjørn, a Nordic entomologist, adds comic relief to the trio’s travels but he isn’t  plausible as a potential partner for Liesl, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise.

Threapleton is Kate Winslet’s daughter. When she delivers her lines archly, dryly and sullenly, she sounds like her mother’s double. Del Toro too seems to be channeling the cadences and timbre of Willem Dafoe’s voice (Dafoe appears in one of several scenes set in Bill Murray’s Heaven). This aural landscape is disorienting because it gives the impression that the movie has been dubbed into English, compounding the artifice of Anderson’s universe.

While Threapleton grounds Liesl, and the film, with a stolid backbone, her presence suggested the possibility of a more robust and relatable Phoenician Scheme. One in which Winslet stars as del Toro’s equal. But Anderson portrays adults interacting with adults through a detached adolescent’s lens. Human sexuality remains PG-rated, Spielbergian, yet to be realized. Men yell at and over each other to accomplish their nefarious negotiations but the menace is either comical or undercooked. Nothing is at stake for viewers when the characters don’t suffer from any actual consequences. In this screenplay, women—and not talented ingénues—are absent players, reduced down to off-screen anecdotes.

The Phoenician Scheme’s charm relies on an expensive array of lacquered surfaces. For a couple of hours, the audience can step inside Anderson’s alternate, slowly fading, sweet-natured reality. But it’s a playground that’s so far removed from ordinary life, only movie stars and their satellites have access to it. The director has created an enviable world on screen but it’s also an alienating one. I walked out of the theater feeling the way that Mia Farrow’s character does at the end of  The Purple Rose of Cairo, cast out of a shimmering mirage of paradise.

Opens locally June 6 at AMC theaters in San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale; Cinemark theaters in Milpitas, Mountain View and San Jose; and Landmark’s Aquarius Theater in Palo Alto.

Nicolas Cage’s character in The Surfer, known only as The Surfer, is visiting a scenic Western Australia spot called Luna Bay with his teenage son, The Kid (played by Finn Little).

The Surfer’s mission is to scout out an old family property. It’s the place where TS (that’s what we’ll call him from now on) was raised in the years before he and his family moved to America—he now wants to relocate there. TS is in the midst of hasty talks with an area real estate agent to buy the place, and he’s exceedingly anxious to close the deal and begin an important new phase of his family life.

Of course we suspect, knowing Cage’s artistic tendencies the way we do from his previous work, that unplanned-for challenges are bound to pop up for TS on the way to achieving his dream.

They do. No sooner do TS and TK step out of their rental car and walk onto the beach than a surly guy in a swim suit snarls an insult at them as he shoulders past. Something on the order of: “Fuck off. Live local, surf local.” Down at the beach shack where TS and son encounter a similarly surly character named Scally (Julian McMahon) and his mates, they hear that this beach is indeed for locals only. They’re not welcome and should leave immediately.

But TS, perhaps a believer in American exceptionalism, or maybe just plain stubborn, is intent on surfing Luna Bay no matter what. One thing leads to another. Obstacles appear and keep on appearing. They are numerous and seemingly endless.

The real estate guy has more important things to do than to help make the sale. TS’ boss back home is sending out bad news. A gang of teenage bullies, Scally’s “cult,” won’t leave the peaceful newcomers alone. Meanwhile TS’ ex-wife is on the line with problematic demands.

In the midst of this, TS’ surfboard gets stolen—he spots it hanging on Scally’s shack, but a nasty local cop refuses to do anything about it. That board isn’t yours, it’s been here for years. More things happen:  TS’ car gets vandalized. He loses his shoes in the restroom and steps on broken glass in the parking lot. A larcenous barista won’t take TS’ charge card, demands that he leave his valuable watch as collateral to pay for a cup of coffee, then closes the snack bar when TS is preoccupied. There’s an angry dog that seems to hate TS, and a snake. In the meantime TS’ son has departed the scene.

The list of mishaps goes on for days and nights. The car gets stolen. TS unwisely, in his thirst, fills a dirty bottle with brown water from the restroom and gulps it down. Oh yes, and a seagull shits on him. He begins to hallucinate in the hot Australian sun. His appearance grows scruffier. We notice he’s beginning to closely resemble the homeless bum who haunts the parking lot.

Could it be that The Surfer is an allegorical tale of psychological agony? The Roadside Attractions release, directed by Lorcan Finnegan from a screenplay by fellow Irishman Thomas Martin, is a far cry from, say, filmmaker Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995), for which Cage was awarded a Best Actor Academy Award.

The Surfer suffers from some basic flaws, but so too do many of the flicks in the actor’s 152-title rap sheet. The scenario treads water for the last 15 minutes of its running time, during which the character undergoes a coda of sorts to break up the monotony of his trip to the bottom. 

Gone are the joyous comic-book machismo of Little Junior Brown in Kiss of Death, the low-rent bent-cop lunacy of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and the ditto what-the-hell of 2023’s vampire clown show Renfield. By contrast, The Surfer is the definition of miscellaneous.

Now playing at AMC Eastridge 15, AMC Mercado 20 and AMC Saratoga 14.

Writer-director David Cronenberg, the veteran specialist in “body horror” tales, sicker-than-thou science fiction and disturbing investigations into the latest trends in psychological torment, has recently spent his cinematic capital on things like Crimes of the Future or Maps to the Stars.

That is, big-picture scenarios about modern people entangled in science-based predicaments. Cronenberg’s characters are always in some sort of jeopardy. They have good reason to feel apprehensive.

With that in mind, Shrouds takes us into the life and times of a wealthy, renowned technocrat named Karsh (played by French actor Vincent Cassel), whose latest venture sounds like some type of techie joke.

In addition to his career as a producer of industrial videos, Karsh has gone into the cemetery business with a property called The Shrouds at Gravetech. The experience begins when a customer buys a burial plot for, say, a recently deceased loved one. The remains are carefully wrapped in a special shroud equipped with the very latest sensors and cameras, connected online to the company, and then interred on the company’s nicely landscaped property.

Using that setup, the survivors can view live video of the body as it goes through various stages—decomposition, etc.—in the ground, on their own computers or the handsomely mounted graveside monitors.

It’s at this point in the film that we ask: Can you run that by us again? You mean someone is willing to pay premium prices—Karsh’s cemetery is expensively decorated, and even boasts an on-site restaurant with eerie “corpse” sculptures—to bury someone in the ground, and then check in on the stiff from time to time? On video? Just to see how things are progressing? Who the hell would want to do that?

Karsh would. His late beloved partner Becca is buried there with tracking devices embedded in and around her remains, and he often visits her resting place on Shroudcam for a high-res view of her decaying body. Any prospective “corpse voyeur” could do the same with their own loved one, for a price. Business seems to be thriving at The Shrouds.

Despite the morbid atmosphere Karsh is surrounded by several friends and business associates when he isn’t zooming through the countryside in his luxury sports car (the film was shot in Cronenberg’s native province of Ontario, Canada). 

Prominent among Karsh’s crowd is Becca’s sister Terry (Diane Kruger, who also portrays Becca in flashbacks), a dog groomer who’s obviously interested in the boss—although he doesn’t reciprocate. Terry mostly flutters around Karsh like the slo-mo moths in the film’s opening credits. She has sexual jealousy memories of him from before; he doesn’t seem to notice.

Terry’s ex, a seemingly amiable nerd named Maury (Guy Pearce) occasionally pops up too. Most curious of the hangers-on is Honey, Karsh’s AI assistant, sometimes a perky, inquisitive pixie, other times an animated koala, but always busy—perhaps too busily—meddling in Karsh’s affairs.

The emotional weather report for all these two-dimensional characters changes drastically when Karsh is introduced to a fellow entrepreneur named Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a blind but very perceptive woman who runs her own cyber-graveyard in Budapest, Hungary. Through the worldly Soo-Min, Karsh gets up to speed on potential international rivals, including a Chinese mega-corporation and some teenage Russian hackers who may be behind the recent vandalism at Gravetech.

Cronenberg obviously delights in the unlikely setting of high-tech undertakers and overseas communist plots (we learn that the late Becca was once the victim of a Stalinist mind experiment) but mostly shuffles distractedly through Karsh’s living, breathing contemporaries. Cool, calm, collected Soo-Min is different.

The Shrouds, not one of the filmmaker’s most compelling outings, startles us with queasy-making imagery that gives way to a chilly quasi-love-story. Neither side compensates for, or even seems to understand, the other. Maybe there’s a pertinent narrative buried somewhere in the relationship of Karsh and Soo-Min. Finding it might take hard work. Keep digging.

Now playing at the AMC Eastridge 15 in San Jose and the AMC Mercado 20 in Santa Clara.

As Locked opens, Eddie (played by Bill Skarsgård) has already joined the tough-shit-out-of-luck club. He’s stone broke, his car is in the shop for major repairs that he has no money to pay for, and he’s being hounded by his ex-wife to pick up their young daughter after school. When the surly garage mechanic insults him, Eddie’s reply is to quickly scoop up the mechanic’s wallet and run down the sidewalk on foot.

He doesn’t get very far before he’s reduced to trying car door handles. Suddenly there appears a miracle—a black, shiny and amazingly unlocked luxury SUV, sitting by itself in a downtown parking lot, with the brand name insignia DOLUS on the back hatch. Eddie jumps in, but finds there’s nothing to steal. Worse yet, when he tries to open the door and escape, the doors and windows are securely locked. No matter how hard he clobbers them, they don’t budge. Eddie now finds himself confined in an impregnable, soundproofed, booby-trapped, four-wheeled prison cell.

Things go downhill even faster for poor Eddie. The smart vehicle is under the control of an unseen owner named William (Anthony Hopkins), who communicates with his victim electronically while torturing him with electric shocks and some hideous polka music—when that doesn’t work he tries Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. William and Eddie match wits, so to speak, along lines of long-established societal resentment. The older man has a grudge against “coddled criminals” and “bleeding hearts,” and absent-mindedly mutters about cutting off the fingers of thieves. The would-be thief pleads poverty.

By this time in the movie—directed by David Yarovesky (Guardians of the Galaxy: Inferno, Brightburn) and produced by veteran horror honcho Sam Raimi—thriller audiences who know their way around might recognize Eddie’s predicament. It has hints of a similar scenario by filmmaker Stuart Gordon. Gordon’s Stuck tells of a newly homeless man, hit in the street by a stoned driver late one night, whose still-living body gets trapped halfway through the car’s windshield. There he stays, bleeding and groaning inside a garage, and no one wants to help him.

Stuck, a 2007 release co-written and directed by the late shockmeister Gordon (Edmond, King of the Ants and the brilliant Re-Animator), is a much better film than Locked.

Despite the efforts of cult favorite Raimi (The Evil Dead, Spider-Man) and a platoon of 27 (count ’em) other producers on Locked, Skarsgård and Hopkins—the latter shows up on screen sometime in the second half—run out of things to do with each other. Once we get past the rather tame mayhem bits—William runs down lower-class pedestrians, blames his SUV-bait snare scheme on previous crimes against his family, etc.—the dialogue can’t maintain the necessary intensity.

After his arguably noteworthy appearance as the title creature in the recent Nosferatu, actor Skarsgård struggles with slack-a-daisical pacing in Locked. Even Hopkins, armed with his Hannibal Lecter–style calmly malevolent line readings, never manages to raise the helter-skelter level much above a dull roar. William seems to bear a generational hatred for the young. When Eddie flinches away from the DOLUS rampage on a city street full of proles, William goads him: “Isn’t this what you wanted, Eddie? Chaos, revolution?” That’s about all there is in the motivational department.

Some quickie one-line thriller concepts work on first reading. Think of Snakes on a Plane, Cocaine Bear or Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. “Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgård Trapped in a Burning Sport Utility Vehicle” somehow doesn’t rouse the imagination, prurient or otherwise. If we believe the credits, it took three writers—Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat and Michael Arlen Ross—to cook up something to take up the minutes after the DOLUS Death Mobile initially snaps its bulletproof doors shut on the pathetic figure of Eddie.

Locked has writing problems, and the combined efforts of Sam Raimi, Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgård can’t do much about it. Maybe call a locksmith.

Now playing at the AMC Eastridge 15 and AMC Saratoga 14 in San Jose and the AMC Mercado 20 in Santa Clara.

Let’s talk about brands, branding and being branded. Brand-name shopping, too. It’s hard to think about Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new drama, without exploring the implications, permutations and curlicues of that term.

Brand-name entertainment shoppers will ostensibly be drawn to the labels Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender and Pierce Brosnan on the marquee. Blanchett’s character, Kathryn St. Jean, a British government intelligence operative, is the wife of Fassbender’s George Woodhouse, a fellow spook. They even work in the same London office space, under the direction of Arthur Stieglitz (Brosnan), a gimlet-eyed spy-monger in a three-piece suit.

As imagined by director Soderbergh (Magic Mike, No Sudden Move, Erin Brockovich) and screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible)—a couple of very bankable brand names—Kathryn and George are in the habit of holding intimate dinner parties with two other couples, all of whom work alongside them in the same MI6-style bureau. Mind games of various sorts are on the menu at these squeaky-tight soirees, with George, the highest-ranking asset at the table, in charge of making his colleagues squirm.

In the best spy-biz-film tradition, it’s hard to tell whether these inquisitive ops and their friends are merely having harmless fun kidding each other with their seemingly aggressive probing and examining, or else viciously goading each other into letting down their guard and revealing their innermost personal secrets. The situation turns even trickier when we learn that George, who cooks the meals for the party, has been lacing the tikka masala with a truth-serum chemical. Just for fun.

Blanchett, of course, is right at home in the role of a cool (verging on frosty) career woman in a cutthroat line of work, mercilessly manipulating those around her while posing in corporate high-fashion clothes. Kathryn embodies that brand with a vengeance. When she suddenly announces she’s off to Zurich, one automatically pictures an assignation with a clandestine lover. Or a Russian trickster selling information. Or both. Kathryn’s most obvious weakness are the pills she “hides” (that’s impossible!) from her colleagues. It’s a pleasure seeing the much-decorated Blanchett luxuriating in her middle age without losing an iota of her essential capacity for menace.

With his black-framed eyeglasses and mid-20th-century-modern wardrobe, Fassbender’s George resembles a combination of Lew Wasserman and William S. Burroughs. His body language completes the effect, as does his meticulous fishing gear. George suspects his spouse of marital infidelity and/or high-level treason, but she’s too cagey to get caught doing either one.

Husband and wife play a cute little game with each other: when one of them gets too close to a “third-rail” line of chatter, the other one will let drop the phrase “black bag,” meaning “let’s not go there, darling.” The pillow talk is wearisome. It’s a bit of what might be called an ingrown relationship. Is their marriage on the rocks? Will the UK fall to pieces on account of their sneaky international shenanigans down at the office? Dunt werry, dollink.

Also grazing in the fortified fields of Vauxhall are Kathryn and George’s comrades-in-arms. Most interesting of these is agency psychologist Zoe Vaughan, played by actor Naomie Harris as a wary wonk able to stay one step ahead of most of the snares she herself has devised for her comrades. Also ideally cast: British actor Tom Burke as Freddy, the odd man out. The line readings would do justice to the spirit of John le Carré or Robert Ludlum. Pretty early on it dawns on us that most of the deceptions on display amount to the pieces of a classic McGuffin.

Congratulations to Soderbergh, Koepp and company for turning in a 93-minute movie matched perfectly with a 93-minute plot line. No extravagant padding here. The world will little note nor long remember Kathryn and George’s delicate tip-toeing through the little murders and silly secrets. Yet Blanchett and Fassbender, nobody’s idea of an endearingly eccentric couple, continue to disturb and amaze.

Now playing at AMC theaters in San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale; Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto, Cinemark theaters in Fremont, San Jose, Milpitas and Mountain View; CineLux theaters in Campbell, Los Gatos and San Jose; and the Pruneyard Dine-In Cinemas.

The sub-sub-genre of Vietnamese-American crime dramas is a small pigeonhole indeed. It would seem that filmmaker Sing J. Lee’s The Accidental Getaway Driver—a Directing Award winner at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival just now getting its first run theatrical debut—has the field pretty much to itself.

Vietnamese immigrant senior Long Ma (TV and movie regular Hiep Tran Nghia) is at his Orange County home late one night, dressed in pajamas, when he gets a phone call from an acquaintance named Tay. Tay—played by Saigon native actor Dustin Nguyen as a smoothie with the cool nerve of a career desperado—needs a ride for himself, plus a pair of his pals who have just escaped from county jail.

Long thinks it over for a second. Then Tay pulls out a handgun and the foursome takes off in Long’s car for a meandering midnight cruise through dusty streets and cheap motel rooms. No one talks much at first, amid director Sing J. Lee’s terse mise-en-scene (co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen). Potentially violent plot turns begin to occur at the slowed-down pace of real life, as seen through a film noir kaleidoscope.

Long’s dilemma, of course, is one of the most familiar in American crime movies. Unnerved by Tay’s description of the time when one of the escapees, Aden (Dali Benssalah), tortured a kidnap victim with a blowtorch in the backseat of a getaway car, Long clams up and does what he is told. The hoods are trying, at this late hour, to get hold of fake passports and leave the country. But it’s obvious they don’t have the brains or luck to pull it off. Where does that leave the old man?

Contemporary audiences don’t meet a character like Long Ma very often. The cinematic tale of an elderly Vietnamese man trying to reconcile memories of his homeland’s turbulent history with his struggle as a lonely, overlooked California newcomer is already unusual enough. Further, Accidental Getaway Driver’s lethal setting is nowhere nearly quite as “camera-ready” as a typical lightweight feel-good flick about, say, crazy rich Asians or the cross-cultural dating scene. When the scenario suddenly adds “accessory to a felony” to Long’s résumé, something’s gotta give.

In his feature-film debut, filmmaker Lee charts an uncustomary course. For a story involving kidnapping, assault and battery and false imprisonment, driver Long’s ordeal takes a surprisingly philosophical turn in the last half. It could easily be mistaken for an adapted stage play, poised uneasily between a sugary SoCal lifestyle flick and a formulaic Fast & Furious wannabe.

As driver Long’s back story is revealed, we learn that he was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese army—i.e., ARVN, the losing side—during the 1950s–’70s war, and is now separated from his wife and children. Long’s face, his downcast expression and his lengthy, aching silences tell us more about him than any amount of expository talk. Almost all the dialogue between Long and his captor Tay is in Vietnamese.

Actor Hiep’s performance, a one-note symphony of regret, is matched step for step by Nguyen’s Tay. Actor-filmmaker Nguyen is a Vietnamese immigrant veteran of A-list multiplex fare as well as Viet-Am crossover projects in festivals. In Accidental the bad guys taking the old man for a ride fall into three familiar categories: Tay, simpatico but frustrated; Aden, the cold, hard killer; and Eddie (actor Phi Vu), the impatient, brutal kid. There’s a $50,000 reward for turning in the escapees. Tay himself did not escape from county jail. Decisions need to be made.

Not quite a bare-knuckle actioner but far from being a carjack weepie, The Accidental Getaway Driver may be the missing link that connects the once-flourishing Vietnamese domestic film industry to Hollywood’s current trends. With its hard-earned straight face it could easily be called a modern-day melange of Collateral and The Petrified Forest. This one is worth the trip.

Opens March 7 at the AMC Eastridge 15, 2190 Eastridge Loop, San Jose. 408.274.2274.